During my primary schooling in Iran in the early 1970s, I worked at my dad’s workshop every morning and attended classes in the afternoon. My school, like some other public schools, ran separate morning and afternoon shifts to meet the work demands of its students. Sometimes I was so tired I fell asleep in class, resulting in embarrassing punishment in front of my classmates. After school, I had limited time to do my homework and eat dinner before crashing in a corner of our living area. There was certainly no time to go out and play with other neighbourhood kids. Unsurprisingly, my school results were average; all my marks were B and below.
By the end of primary school, my father sold his business and bought a second-hand taxi in the hope of making a better living. Consequently, by the time I started high school, I no longer had to work with my father; I could go to school each morning and study. That was easy!
Gradually, I began to enjoy maths, science, and literature. To my surprise, I improved in all my subjects and was placed second in our class at the end of the year. I continued to improve and was placed first the following year and subsequently represented our school in the state’s maths and science competitions.
What was the key to my success at school? What changed in me?
I often hear friends and colleagues raving about a particular individual’s IQ or natural aptitudes. I wonder how credible these claims are, and whether intelligence is about genetic superiority.
Your IQ, or Intelligence Quotient, is your score on a particular intelligence test. A score of 100 represents the average IQ. If you have an IQ greater than 130, roughly 97.5 per cent of people in your age group score lower than you. People with an IQ of 115 to 124 are above average, 125 to 134 are gifted, 135 to 144 are highly gifted, and 145 to 164 are regarded by some as geniuses.
Undoubtedly, genetic factors play a big role in intelligence, but generalisations about people’s natural abilities, like most generalisations, are not particularly helpful. There are a lot of famous people who initially seemed intellectually backward to their teachers: Albert Einstein couldn’t read until he was seven; Isaac Newton did poorly at school; when Thomas Edison was a boy, his teachers told him he was too stupid to learn anything; Wernher von Braun (father of the US space program) failed ninth-grade algebra; and Louis Pasteur got a C in chemistry at university.
These men prove that children who are slow starters, students who may not do well at tests and may get poor results, can change. Change is a fundamental human characteristic. You may wonder what change in you might unleash your particular genius and creativity.
According to Allan Snyder, the director of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney, creativity and genius require a person to be able to see the details of a situation or idea, as well as the big picture. However, most of us only see the big picture. For instance, if we read a book, we will probably remember what the story was about, but not particular words and passages.
Autistic savants see the detail, rather than the whole.
The rest of us try to fit the things we see and hear into the big picture in our brains. But in order to make new and different connections, we have to let go of the big picture – at least temporarily.
Snyder defines creativity as being able to make connections between things that seem unrelated. To make these connections, we have to begin to see situations in a non-automatic way.
I’m not too sure what transformed Einstein or Edison, but each one must have been affected by a substantial experience or been profoundly inspired by a person or an encounter.
As the design manager at our firm, occasionally I have to interview applicants for the position of design engineer in the design department. Five years ago, out of desperation, I hired a graduate engineer who neither did well in the interview nor passed the technical test. Despite his unimpressive engineering and communication skills, he gradually began to enjoy design. His interest in engineering and project management grew exponentially and within a year the transformation in him was astounding. He’s now a capable structural engineer with a very bright future.
I can now identify the key to my own academic success in high school. Being deprived of a proper education during my primary school created an immense craving in me to learn. I was hungry to attend school like other normal kids; I was hungry to compete and excel.
At fifty-nine, I’m now too wrapped up in the big picture, working hard to be a good manager, a good father, a good citizen. It feels like any potential genius inside me is trapped underneath layers of automatic thoughts and actions. Can I reclaim my adolescent mental ability? I hope that I can. After all, our desire and ability to change will surely trump natural aptitude or our IQ score.
